


The last lost vestiges

by ber_g



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s12e11 Regarding Dean, Gen, Memory Loss, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 00:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20648459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ber_g/pseuds/ber_g
Summary: Dean's memories return; more a trickle than a flood.(Written for the Summergen 2019 exchange, for the prompt 'At the end of Regarding Dean, Rowena fixes/stabilises Dean's mind, but his memories don't just come flooding back all at once')





	The last lost vestiges

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rant_girl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rant_girl/gifts).

Rowena flicks her hands, sending sparks and a vague scent of something musty and herbaceous in Dean’s direction like she’s shaking off water. “There, that should do it. Give it time, in a few days he should be back to factory specs.”

“What do you mean a few days? I thought you said you could fix him.” She gives Sam a dry look and wipes her hands down her skirt, smoothing it out and squaring her shoulders.

“He is fixed, lad. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your brother. It’s all back in his head but being stripped out like that was a messy job and it’ll take a bit of time before everything, ah, resettles. Have a wee holiday and do try not to get him knocked over the head again, hm?” She leaves with the squeal of her boot on the glossy floor and a whirl of red hair, and Sam turns to his brother.

Dean is staring into space, the witch-killing gun dangling loosely at his side. When Sam steps in front of him he turns and brightens after a second. “Heya, Sammy. Jeez, kid, you’re getting tall, swear you were shorter than me a week ago.”

Sam grits his teeth, grips Dean’s elbow and steers him out the door.

\---

The line at the coffee shop isn’t too long the next morning, just a handful of businesspeople and service workers zoning out while they wait for their first caffeine fix of the day. Sam stifles a yawn, shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket and glances at an entirely too energetic Dean out of the corner of his eye.

“The usual?”

Dean squints up at the menu for a long moment. “The usual. Right. And that is...”

“Uh. Coffee, black. And you liked the muffins last time we were here. You got a blueberry one.” 

"Huh. I liked the walnut ones, last time I had a muffin. But sure, blueberry sounds good." Sam wracks his brain for the last time Dean had a walnut muffin, draws a blank and then they're at the counter with an overeager barista taking their order. They collect their coffee and muffins and Sam shoulders the door open to the brisk, chilly morning outside. Dean leans against the Impala's trunk and tears into his muffin with one hand while Sam waits impatiently beside him for his coffee to cool down to drinkable temperature.

Dean's dropping crumbs everywhere but the muffin vanishes in about thirty seconds flat - apparently magic curses make a person hungry. He palms his coffee with a contented sigh, watching trucks rumble by on the highway in the distance.

"I think Mrs. Wallerman's were still better."

That brings Sam up short, the latest jarring thing Dean's come up with this morning as his brain sorts through thirty eight years worth of memories dumped back into it in a matter of minutes. 

"Who's Mrs. Wallerman?"

"You know, the old lady next door when we were in Lubbock for that poltergeist. Think you were in what, sixth grade?" It takes Sam a moment to place her, sorting through memories calloused over by years and years, but he's pretty sure he remembers a woman with deep dimples and a different floral muumuu for every day of the week, sneaking them pastries and plums from her daughter's garden when they passed her in the halls of their dingy apartment building. She made these walnut muffins with cinnamon and nutmeg, and he saw Dean eat four in a sitting once.

“Right, yeah. She had that pug that yapped at you all the time.”

“Only ‘cause I wouldn’t share my kickass muffin.” Dean rolls his head back and forth, stretching as the caffeine starts to work his magic on him. The early morning sunlight makes his hair look lighter and the wrinkles on his face less prominent. Sam carefully folds his worries into a box somewhere in the back of his mind, just for a few minutes, and sips his coffee.

\---

Rexburg is chilly this time of year, heavy clouds above and heavy coats on the people they pass by. They’re not hunting, exactly, Dean’s still too scattered for Sam to risk it, but Jody caught wind of a potential situation, something about a cursed doll and a series of minor fires, and they were in the area, so she asked them to investigate a little before she sends in the cavalry; make sure it isn’t just dumbshit teenagers engaging in a little petty arson for kicks. Sam’s fed suit itches and he’s pretty sure the jacket shrunk in the wash.

“Hey, remember the last time we were here?”

“Uh. The shapeshifting professor? Yeah, I guess.”

“No. What?” Dean pulls a ‘what the fuck Sam’ face. “It was a witch, hexing students. There was that smokeshow Mormon chick all over me after I saved her.” Sam returns his look with a blank one of his own, trying to remember a witch in Utah and drawing a blank. “You really don’t remember?” Dean’s voice has a smug lilt now, pleased he remembers something Sam doesn’t. “This was like, what, fall of 2003?” Oh.

Dean’s memories are flooding back into place pretty steadily and mostly in order but just this morning he fumbled cleaning his gun, something he’s known how to do every since his hands were big enough to pull it apart. Magic is generally more art than science, anyways, and much as Rowena is kind of an only-occasionally-homicidal friend these days he wouldn’t put it past her to have scrambled things up a little further to give herself a head start on them while Sam tries to put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

So it shouldn’t exactly be shocking that Dean doesn’t remember that Sam was at Stanford in the fall of 2003, panicking his way through Psych 201 finals rather than saving hot Mormons from witches alongside his brother. Still, he stiffens, flooded with cold the way he always gets when the subject comes up, a tangled knot of regret and pride and defiance in his chest he’s given up trying to unravel.

At least Dean seems to have skipped over Sam being weird and distracted himself with charming the pants off a chipper young deputy in order to get them into the records room. Sam shoots off a prayer - directed to who, he couldn’t say - that when Dean does remember they don’t have to relive the fight about it from what feels like half a dozen lifetimes ago. 

They get through the rest of the day without any major issues, confirm from police records that the fires match what Jody turned up of the sale records for the doll and Sam is emailing the crappy cell phone pics he grabbed of the latest crime scene to Jody in their bizarrely nautical-themed motel room by late evening. Dean called dibs on first shower, said he wanted to get the smell of smoke out of his hair as soon as he had a chance, and he’s been in there long enough for Sam to finish emailing Jody and start halfway drifting off to sleep by the time Dean emerges with a wave of warm air and steam looking damp and scrubbed pink.

He pauses in the doorway, fiddling with the doorknob before shaking his head and making his way to his bed. “I ever tell you I’m proud of you?”

“Huh?”

“Full ride. Considering you went to what, eleven different high schools, that’s pretty impressive.”

“You remembered.”

“Yeah, this afternoon. We were talking to that dude in the laundromat and I remembered that the witch case I ended up covered in goat blood and had to wash my shit in my underwear since it was all I had that was clean. Everything else kind of came back after that. But, like I said, proud of you kid.”

“Oh.” Sam isn’t sure what to say, watches Dean who’s dropped down and grabbed the remote. Thinks about Dean at twenty, twenty one, shoving sandwiches into Sam’s backpack in the morning and at night wheedling an extra week in town out of their dad so he could finish a group project, about Dean at twenty two driving him to the bus stop with barely dry eyes and hauling him into a gruff hug, and the phone number on a scrap of paper he found tucked into his pocket the next day. He never called it but he kept it with him, through dorms and roommates and apartments, tucked into a book until it burned up in the fire. He leans back on his own bed, parallel to his brother, and lets whatever bad soap opera Dean’s landed on lull him to sleep.

\---

They’re halfway across Oklahoma, late at night with nothing but farm fields around, when Dean cranks down the driver’s side window, sticks his head out, and whoops “I fucking killed Hitler!” into the wind. Sam laughs so hard his belly hurts.

\---

“How are you still here?”

Sam glances up from his book. The low light of the bunker’s library this late casts harsh shadows over Dean’s face where he’s looming over Sam, expression tight and tense. He’s got his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, feet planted wide like he’s braced for an impact.

“What time is it? I didn’t think it was that late, guess I got caught up reading.”

“No, not - ” an abortive elbow gesture from Dean, shifting his weight a little from one side to the other. “Not here, here. Like with me.” Oh.

He knows, but he asks anyways. “What’d you remember?”

“Zeke. Or, Gadreel.”

Sam thumbs his book shut and props his elbows on his knees, scrubbing his hands through his hair and studying the patterns in the wood floor. Knocks out a breath before he turns to look Dean straight on.

“It was hard, I’m not gonna lie. After everything, to have you do that was, yeah. For awhile I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to stay. I dunno how much you remember, exactly, but things with us got pretty rough for awhile, and I can’t say I regret it or I’d take it back.” 

Dean lets out a loud breath and drops into the chair opposite Sam's, stares at his lap like a chastised child. Sam can almost physically feel the pressure building in the room, and he presses on like a knife.

"I was angry. I still am angry, on some level. But it’s like a scar, right? For awhile it was an open wound, and I was barely holding it together, and now it’s mostly healed up and I don’t even think about it some days. We’re never gonna be the same people we were before you made that choice, but I made decisions too. I decided that I’d rather be here than anywhere else. Okay?”

It hangs in the air between them for a long moment and then Dean nods jerkily, slouches back in his chair. “Jesus. This Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Dean crap is a pain in the ass. It’s like, I know there’s shit I’m not remembering, but I don’t know what I don’t know, and - I’ve had more sappy conversations in the last week than I have in the past ten years.” Sam snorts and shakes his head.

“I think you’re misremembering that movie. And I dunno, there were plenty of, what’d you call it, ‘chick flick moments’ when we were dealing with the Mark and Amara. You just don’t remember them yet.”

“_You’re_ a chick flick moment. Fuck. I’m too sober for this. Do we have beer? Please tell me we have beer.”

“Yeah, yeah. C’mon. You remember where the kitchen is yet, or is that gone too, old man?” Sam pushes himself up and Dean follows, tries to sneakily thump the back of Sam’s head for that and misses when Sam dodges at the last second. He follows Sam out of the room.

\---

Sam is just about ready to be done with the Dean’s-entire-life world tour. Rowena’s estimate of a few days has been stretched out into a week and a half, he’s now ninety percent sure intentionally on her part, and much as it’s been nice to take the enforced break, he could do without the jittery, unbalanced feeling of having only half his brother around. 

So far today, Dean’s remembered a wraith case dad took them on when he was seventeen, Bobby’s death, and how to curse fluently in Klingon, which Sam wasn’t aware he knew in the first place but he demonstrated at gleeful length over omelettes at breakfast before they struck out on the road again. 

The case Dean dug up is a couple days drive so they spend the day in the car, Sam reading in shotgun and Dean drumming his fingers over the steering wheel to the rhythm of Zepp as he cruises them across the country. It’s a microcosm of the best parts of their lives - they stop for greasy burgers at a diner in Dighton, and when they pause the music to refuel Dean comes out of the gas station convenience store with his arms full of snacks and tosses Sam an iced coffee with a grin. They find a motel tucked off the highway and Sam’s ready to crash after a blissfully peaceful day, but Dean tosses his duffle bag down and flips his keys around his fingers, looking at Sam expectantly. 

“C’mon. Got something.”

Sam follows, holding back the urge to ask why. Dean slides back behind the wheel and peels off out of the parking lot, bypassing the downtown area nearby and pointing them towards the rural outskirts. The Impala’s headlights cut a warm swathe through the dark but they only illuminate towering pines and empty fields. Finally Dean pulls over on the side of the road, next to a field that looks identical to the ones on either side. He grabs a plastic bag with somethings angular inside it out of the trunk and trudges off into the damp grass. Sam follows obligingly.

Dean drops to a crouch a dozen yards out from the car and rummages around in his bag. Sam is content to wait a few feet behind him, just sticks his hands into his pockets and tilts his head back to watch the dizzying field of stars above them, less pinpricks and more like someone took a paintbrush and went wild, this far out from any light pollution.

“I remembered the apocalypse a few days ago and I know you told me some of the crap the angels pulled but they pulled a _lot_ of crap that year and uh, got some more back myself yesterday, so. Figured it was about time we got to remember something good.” There’s a sound of crinkling plastic, a glassy clink and a snap-and-fizz, and Dean skitters back, the bag hanging off one hand and the other carrying two bottles of beer, one of which he passes to Sam.

The firework burns low for a few seconds, almost looks like it’s a dud and Dean gets one step forward and a “Goddamnit, cheap piece of - ” out of his mouth before it whooshes upwards with a crackle of sparks and whistles, lighting up the night around them. Sam couldn’t hide his grin if he tried, and Dean whoops, clatters his beer against Sam’s and jostles his shoulder as the smell of gunpowder and smoke wraps around them like a familiar blanket.


End file.
